The Early Stories - by John Updike (Paperback)

About the Book

A harvest and not a winnowing, "The Early Stories" preserves almost all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and 1975. Of these 103 stories, 80 first appeared in "The New Yorker," and the remaining 23 in other journals.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

A harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction that John Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975. "How rarely it can be said of any of our great American writers that they have been equally gifted in both long and short forms," reads the citation composed for John Updike upon his winning the 2006 Rea Award for the Short Story. "Contemplating John Updike's monumental achievement in the short story, one is moved to think of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps William Faulkner--writers whose reputations would be as considerable, or nearly, if short stories had been all that they had written. From [his] remarkable early short story collections . . . through his beautifully nuanced stories of family life [and] the bittersweet humors of middle age and beyond . . . John Updike has created a body of work in the notoriously difficult form of the short story to set beside those of these distinguished American predecessors. Congratulations and heartfelt thanks are due to John Updike for having brought such pleasure and such illumination to so many readers for so many years."

Review Quotes

"Classic gems . . . These stories, like Mr. Updike's finest novels . . . preserve a time and a place through the sorcery of words."--The New York Times

"[Updike is] akin to Coleridge and Shelley, only with an American twist. One story at a time, he [reminds] Americans that in spite of life's largesse, things fail; one sentence at a time, he reveals that through the small details, it can be sublime."--The Denver Post

"Updike's artistry--normally glimpsed in sections, like a person through window slats--is wholly and deeply seen. . . . One reads through the plenitude with delight, expectation, and at all times gratitude."--The Atlantic Monthly

About the Author

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.